Prior to Saturday, across the past 40 seasons, the No. 1 and No. 2 schools met 16 times in the regular season. None of the teams that played in those games wound up winning the national championship.
Bruce Pearl’s top-ranked Auburn Tigers can buck that trend.
Because what happened at Coleman Coliseum — Auburn winning 94-85 against No. 2 Alabama with insistent style and impressive resourcefulness despite losing two key players to foul-outs — was more than just another impressive Quad 1 win.
Though, it was also that. The Tigers’ victory brought them to 14 Q1 dubs, which is six more than the trio of teams with eight apiece, all of them from the SEC: Alabama and Kentucky, which lost Saturday, and Tennessee (which nearly lost).
Auburn, comfortably the No. 1 overall seed in Saturday afternoon’s top-16 bracket reveal, is moving toward a plane of its own existence and legitimacy. In this, the best version of the SEC we’ve ever seen, Auburn is simultaneously a major reason for that while separating from its conference brethren in the process.
If there was going to be real doubt about the nation’s best team in the nation’s best conference, Alabama needed to bring its best and provide room for skepticism on Saturday, given it had the benefit of hosting the Tigers in the pair’s first of two scheduled matchups (with more possibly to come in the postseason).
Instead, the Tide were rolled following one of their worst 3-point showings of the season (5-of-26), a dismal display that doomed Nate Oats’ team en route to a first: Saturday is the only time Alabama has failed to lead at home since Oats got there in 2019.
“They’re the No. 1 team in the country for a reason,” Oats said.
His team entered Saturday shooting 56% in its previous three games; Alabama was merely 38.6% against the Tigers. All-Americna guard Mark Sears finished with 18 points, his two second-half 3s significant to get the game tied at 68, but then the Tigers outscored the Crimson Tide 26-17 in the final eight minutes, carried by Johni Broome — who did so on a tender ankle, no less.
At 22-3 one month from Selection Sunday, something special is starting to come into view here. Auburn is already shaping up as a great team in the context of this season. But if this continues, we’re going to have a whole new level of domination in play. Pearl’s team is well on its way to having the best NCAA résumé of the NET era (which dates back seven seasons). Auburn needs four more Quad 1 wins to break Kansas’ record of 17 (from 2022-23), a record that seems destined to be broken.
Saturday’s win also seemed to all but clinch Auburn’s fate of being the No. 1 overall seed 28 days from now, when the big bracket is revealed. It’s unthinkable how anyone could catch this team.
Only a couple more reasonable “ifs” away from all-time greatness.
If Auburn can get to the NCAA Tournament with, say, four or fewer losses. And if it can treat its March Madness foes the way it’s treated most of its opponents through the first three-plus months of the season, then Pearl could have a team fit for legendary status.
That’s what Saturday’s win was about. That’s how it recalibrated the Auburn story. It was the biggest game in the history of the SEC in the regular season, yet Auburn refused to bring the drama and Alabama couldn’t induce it in the final five minutes. They were upset last weekend by Florida, a loss Pearl told me a few days ago woke this team up in the sense that they shouldn’t and won’t take pre-game prep haphazardly again.
Through 25 games, Auburn’s …
- Nine wins vs. ranked opponents are already three more than any other season in school history
- Four wins vs. top-10 opponents tie a program record
- Three wins vs. top-five opponents are the most in a season in program history and the most in college basketball this season
The absurdity of it all: Auburn’s done this while playing the toughest schedule in the country. Few teams have ever been so great against a mightier gauntlet. It’s 7-0 in SEC road games, doing it against an SEC that could go down for having the greatest collective single season in NCAA history.
Adding to the legend is Broome, whose casually dominant 19 points, 14 rebounds and six assists Saturday marked the fourth time this season the stellar senior has had at least 18 points, 14 rebounds and five assists in a game.
No other player else has more than one.
That’s only a small reason why Broome is slightly ahead of Duke’s Cooper Flagg for national player of the year heading into the back half of February. A big one: Auburn is still No. 1, thanks to Broome most of all, in almost every advanced metric.
With Saturday’s win creating more SEC separation, the Tigers should remain perched atop the mountain until March. Their next three games are at home, all of them lined up to be Tigers victories, probably with some room to breathe in each: Arkansas, Georgia, Ole Miss. The first two are bubble teams whose fates could well be in the NIT. Ole Miss is capable but erratic.
A year after UConn’s historic strut to back-to-back titles, it looks like we’ve got a team on the level of those great Huskies squads.
Remember, Auburn has looked like the No. 1 team in the country ever since its outstanding showing in the deepest Maui field ever. I was there that week and wrote about the patented Maui Bump. But we’re halfway through February and this is more than just a bump — it’s become a season-long rocket boost that is zooming toward March and, after that, possibly college basketball history.
